


Roughing It

by Mizushimo



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Camping is fun, Corrupted Gem, Fish out of Water, Gen, Running Away, Space Dorito vs the entire planet, bug monster, going it alone, logs, lots of ranting, nature hatred
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-21 10:41:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4826045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizushimo/pseuds/Mizushimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peridot is stuck on Earth with no help, no ship, no company, and no ticket home. But she still has a mission to carry out, even if she has to do it in the most primitive working conditions that the cruddy, disgusting ex gem colony called 'Earth' has to offer.  The road is hard, but she makes a few surprising discoveries on the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stranded in the Mud

**Author's Note:**

> This will mostly be scenes wrapped around Peridot's mission logs. The time frame will be from just after 'Jailbreak' up until just after 'Friendship'. Will add relevant character tags as they appear.

Rain thumped on her head, it ran down her body and puddled on the saturated ground where she sat. Every millimeter of her existence right now was a gigantic wet mess. The ship had exploded, there no trace of Jasper or the informant, the escape pod was a mostly useless hunk of smoking tech. This was possibly the worst day Peridot had ever experienced in her life! Bits of plant matter and corn stalks stuck to her outer casing in the dreary downpour.

Why did this miserable planet have to be so goopy and wet? Everything was so frail, and flimsy, and fragile. All the green in this cornfield would turn into a sodden pile of black ooze in a few months. Not her though, forget flesh and entropy. She was a gem, solid, eternal and—stuck. Peridot glared at the arm she’d been trying to lift. With a grunt, she yanked out out of the mud, it came free with a squelch and a pop. To her horror, it was covered, smeared with a thick brown mud. The wet earth dribbled down her arm and dropped off the end of her casing, her fingers squirmed pathetically in muck, she could _feel_ the slime just _everywhere_. A shudder went through her body, from her grimy feet to the top of her pointy head. Peridot couldn’t stand it any longer, she sprung to her feet. 

“Ewwww!” she exclaimed and flailed her arm wildly to shake off the disgusting organic goop. 

She looked down at her fingers, they were even more stuck on Earth then she was! Disgusted, she dug at the ground with her foot, as she trying to dislodge them out while having as little contact with the muck as possible. This was hell. This was the place all bad gems went to die when they outlived their usefulness. God she hated this crummy planet! HATE!!! 

* * *

A few hours later, a tiny pinging in her right ear signaled that it was time to record her daily log. The day had been exciting enough that she'd already recorded 2, but routine was important. She sighed, and pulled up the display. At least she was dry now, mostly, and there was no requirement that it had to include video. She could be as dirty and decrepit as an organic life form and no one would know.

Log 639 (Continuation 3) - Landed successful on the surface. Took relevant equipment and moved away from escape pod to avoid detection. The ship has fragmented, and the whereabouts of my escort and informant are unknown - presumed incapacitated. I am in the process of orienting to my surroundings and will resume the search for relevant landmarks at daybreak. - End Log 

With a flick of her finger, she switched off the official log and moved to a heavily encrypted file. This one was off limits to everyone, including her superiors. It was better if the Authority continued to see her as a valuable asset instead of..well, a gigantic pointy headed weirdo. 

(Log 639 appendix) - I want to punch my sorry excuse for an escort in her outrageous pointy nose for abandoning me here on this planet! Why did Jasper decide that this mission was a great time to pursue some ancient vendetta with the front side of her face? Because of her, I am out of resources, cut off from homeworld and behind schedule! My original timetable didn’t include ‘cowering in the woods under a portable single occupancy housing unit until daylight, the rain stops or the danger passes!’

She paused and glanced around the small enclosure. Light from her display reflected off the thin green walls, it was familiar. The ambience calmed her down in the tiniest way. 

This shelter may be the only tolerable thing that happened all day. I pilfered it from an unattended storage unit. I have to admit that it’s shape isn’t…terrible. I can sit up in it without damaging its cloth sides with my stupid head. At least the nylon shields me from all this rain and mud— Which I’m still digging out of the crevasses in my casing. Did I mention that I hate this planet? Because I really really REALLY hate this disgusting, gooey, smelly planet!! \- Peridot Out!


	2. Creepy Crawlies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You remind me of someone I know

Log 639 - Downloaded location data onto the memory in my enhancers from a defunct monitoring hub. This action took much longer then expected due interfacing problems with the archaic gem technology and an unexpected monster infestation—

Something shifted in the darkness. Peridot banished the log and looked around furtively. She wished that she still had contact with her robonoids, she could have sent them blindly scuttling through the half melted hub until they found the central control. But no, she was the one that had to spend hours skulking through badly lit corridors and dead end tunnels with no support. The hub wasn’t exactly in optimal condition. The whole building had somehow melted into the rock mountain it once sat on top of, and so far there was no record of how such a thing was even possible. She needed a team of twenty—no thirty science class gems and support constructs to figure out what had happened in abandoned gem colony 425. 

Another scuttling sound interrupted her train of thought, she froze, her eyes tracked around the empty room, searching for the source of the noise. No, forget a science team, all she needed was at least fifty combat class gems as an escort, instead of the giant orange sedimentary with a surprise millennia old grudge. The records hadn’t mentioned that, for some reason, this entire planet was crawling with feral mutants! 

She pressed her back against the wall and tried to scoot away from the nightmare that was slithering in the far corner. If only that ‘steven’ hadn’t broken her destabilizer! A shadow flickered in the watery green light of the console. She felt her gem pulse as the shadow became sharper. Peridot counted seven—no fourteen legs and two gaping pinchers--moving slowly in her direction. 

_NOPE!_ Peridot leapt off the wall and took off at a dead run, away from the crawling nightmare. Machinery crashed and crunched behind her. Suddenly the mutant thing’s segmented tail surged into her path, blocking the exit. Peridot yelped and spun around, her eyes were half as wide as the rest of her face, her limbs locked up terror. The thing had an almost flat head--grey and green--it was hard to tell colors in the gloom. Its pinchers were the size of her forearm, green liquid oozed from its short, wide mouth full of tiny sharp teeth. Terror kept her frozen in place. This thing, this monster—a giant unknown—formless, placeless, purposeless—abomination! The mutant bug tilted it’s head back—ready to striker. A Green glow from another source weirdly lit up the sides of its face. She spotted the source immediately. A gem on the underside of it’s chin. She knew that shape. Instantly, she snapped back into action. 

“No!” she yelled, half in an attempt to startle herself out of terror. “You are not going to eat me, you deformed, mutated bug!” 

It roared in response, but it didn’t strike just yet. Peridot used her arm to block the flying flecks of acid and atrocious monster breath that came out of its mouth. A few drops fell on her exposed body stung, but that just made her more angry. What to do—she had no weapons, but this thing—this broken thing had NO RIGHT to eat her! She sent one of her fingers flying, it jabbed the monster in it’s gem with as much force as she could muster—which wasn’t very much, but that didn’t seem to matter. The mutant stopped dead, as if jolted by a spark of electricity. One tiny finger proved more effective than her enter hand shaped ship had been just days earlier. 

She continued ardently. “You might not remember what you’re doing here—but I know somewhere in that addled impulse center in your skull cavity, you know who I am!” she was talking very very fast. It wasn't attacking, that's all that mattered. “I know that you know better than to obstruct the actions of a fellow agent who is carrying out OFFICIAL EMPIRE BUSINESS!” she jabbed the monster’s gem repeatedly. Yes, this was much better then fear. _Hang on to that, Peridot, this was no way for a subordinate to treat a superior!_

The monster didn’t know what to do for a moment. Peridot’s words hung in the air. Its tiny black eyes reflected the strange light of its gem. Peridot growled menacingly without thinking. It seemed like the appropriate action. The calm didn’t last, the giant bug shifted and roared long and low. Peridot snapped back from wordless outrage to reality. _A solution!_ She called back her finger and braced her arm straight out in front. She had one thing that could be used as a weapon. Maybe. It could work. She concentrated, her fingers rotated around the top of her arm enhancers, they spun faster and faster and morphed into longer blades. 

The monster lunged down, ready to bite her arm off, but her finger blades clipped its face pincher and forced it's head back. The impact sent Peridot flying backwards. Instinctively she tucked up her legs and barely passed over it’s thrashing tail. The monster screamed another chittering roar. Peridot was trying her best to keep flying backwards and long as possible, but she was flying blind and out of balance in a narrow space. Only seconds past before her flight path started to go wrong. 

“ow ow ow OW ow!” She bounced from wall to floor to ceiling, in a desperate attempt to put as much distance between her and the enraged monster as possible. Then her copter-arm hit a wall and almost forced the blades into her face. “!!!!!” She jerked her head away just in time and accidentally somersaulted in mid air, then crashed hard into another wall as the pathway turned. Her flight was canceled. 

She wanted to lay there forever until the world stopped wobbling and twitching. Nice, solid, ordinary DRY ground. She changed her mind when another roar echoed down the hallway. Peridot bolt to her feet from her previous configuration as a heap of limbs and rocks. It suddenly didn’t matter how battered and bruised she was, there was no way that she was going to stick around for round 2. Peridot got her to her feet and started running down the broken tunnel and she didn’t stop until she saw daylight. 

Hours later, something else peered out of the station’s ruined entrance. Its tiny eyes were almost blinded in the daylight. It hesitated at the threshold, its many legs clicked and scrapped on the weathered stone. The caverns were the only place it had ever know. Or was it? Memories stirred, shadows, sounds, blurs of colors it had never seen. Gems were tasty but this one, flat, bright, green sharper then its own. That one meant something. Something distant. 

Home.


End file.
